I have pondered that thought more than once. Is it true that some developments are inevitable? Could it be that some major turning points in history are happenstance based on random events?
Without the JFK assassination and the LBJ Presidency, would the 68GCA have moved through Congress? What if JFK had chosen another VP yet still been elected and assassinated--would US history have been different? Suppose, just suppose, Nixon had campaigned just a bit better and obviously won the 60 election--I seriously believe the US today would be a substantially different country.
'What ifs' can provide a good way to help understand how the choices we make today really can affect the future...
There are tipping points, and then there are a whole slew of things that follow that are virtually inevitable, in one configuration or another. Rather than specific incidents that can have any number of unpredictable factors, macro-level trends are generally more reliable at both giving you a good indication of the way things are headed, and and vaguely predicting specific incidents that might act as turning points.
Urbanization more often than not leads to what we would consider to be liberal attitudes in cities. There are exceptions, but generally that's the way it works - and even in the exceptions, they're more liberal than most rural areas. After WW II, the movement of families out of cities and into massive suburban sprawl areas meant that (1) cities became almost exclusively the abode of the poor, the bohemian and the criminal, and (2) most families, by going suburban, ended up "moderate" - not rural-level conservative. As suburban areas became central areas for shopping and living, this became even more true - rural people either moved to the suburbs, or suburbanized their own rural areas.
All of this moving around meant that inner cities were left a liberal wasteland, and mostly what these people saw of guns was bad - ie, crime. Suburban areas moderated their residents with a comfortable life, and even encroached on the rural areas. We even see this today, and it's a big reason why legislatures have more and more turned against firearms since the 1950s.
Now, specifically...huge drug waves were helped immensely by the ruined inner cities. The 1960s hippie crap has been well-researched, and was caused by both the huge drug waves and as a rebellion against the postwar period. Kennedy didn't have to get shot for the GCA to get passed; it was pretty much already a done deal. It may have gotten passed later, or may have been a little different, but the essential result would have been the same.
Unless we do something as drastic as depopulating ourselves and moving people back out to farms, or impose a civil paramilitary draft, an anti-gun climate was virtually preordained when the government started offering VA loans.
